


alien kiss

by facingthenorthwind (spacegandalf)



Series: space opera au [3]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space Opera, Community: HPFT, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-12
Updated: 2019-01-12
Packaged: 2019-10-08 16:30:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17389790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacegandalf/pseuds/facingthenorthwind
Summary: Everyone in the universe knows Sirius Black fancies Remus Lupin. The challenge is getting Remus Lupin to believe it.





	alien kiss

**Author's Note:**

> I was like 'what should i call this oh no' and shreya was like 'keep the google doc title', which was 'space opera: alien kiss edition', so... i guess here we are.
> 
> as always, space opera means not thinking too hard about how anything works, embrace the meaningless of everything.
> 
> for HPFT's great collab, theme 'new beginnings' and challenge 'space opera'.

Everyone knew Sirius Black fancied Remus Lupin. People in different solar systems probably knew it. People on the other side of the galaxy, perhaps. Certainly everyone at Pigfarts did, barring possibly Remus Lupin himself.

Most people developed a sense of shame that stopped them from flirting too conspicuously with the object of their affections, but not Sirius Black. He felt perfectly free to compliment Remus on his appearance daily, gaze at him dreamily, and generally be a besotted loser in his presence. 

It had had no noticeable effect, but to all observers, he was undeterred, his enthusiasm never flagging.

James Potter, friend of both parties, pulled Remus aside one evening when Sirius was occupied, and said in a low voice, “You know I love you like a brother, mate, but I’m not sure why you’re stringing Sirius along like this.” He was attempting not to look disapproving. The judgement of whether he succeeded or not was up to the observer.

“Like what?” Remus frowned, looking up at James in genuine confusion. 

James tried a different tack. “If you’re not into him, just have the decency to tell him, okay? I promise we’ll all still be your friend! Sirius too, even, though he might need some time to process it. Nothing bad will happen. You won’t lose anyone.”

Remus’s face shifted from confusion to worry, which didn’t bode well for the conversation, as far as James was concerned.

“I don’t know what you mean. I — lose… I don’t understand what I’m meant to be telling him.”

James took a deep breath. Perhaps Welbian courting rituals were absurdly specific and that’s why Remus hadn’t caught on? Perhaps they required Sirius to give Remus a single petal from the flibberbottom flower on the equinox and then recite a certain poem from the 74th century in order to declare his intentions? Or perhaps Remus was just incredibly, impossibly thick.

“That you’re not interested in dating him. He’s been flirting with you for months, and I just think it’d be kinder to put him out of his misery if you have no intention of accepting him.” The emotion on Remus’s face morphed back into confusion, and James prayed to every ancestor he had for the strength to get through whatever was going to come next.

“He can’t fancy me, though, you must be wrong.” It was the first time Remus had sounded sure of anything, confident as if he were answering a comprehension question in class.

“How could you miss it? He literally wrote ‘I love you Remus Lupin’ on your dinner in swint sauce when you came in late from xenobiology two days ago. Our Sirius is not one for subtlety.”

“I just figured that’s what friends do, right? Or he was joking. I mean, he loves to joke.”

“Not about this. Name one time when he’s joked about fancying someone.” As Remus opened his mouth to reply, James hurriedly added, “McGonagall doesn’t count, I mean a fellow student he could _actually_ date.”

“He can’t actually date me, though,” Remus said matter-of-factly.

“...Why not?” Had James missed something obvious? Did Remus already have a partner, perhaps back home? He’d never mentioned anyone. Did Welbers not have any romantic partners? James cursed, once again, that he didn’t pay half as much attention as he should to Xenoculture Studies. 

“I’m a Welber and he’s… he’s so beautiful. He has such a luscious tail. Have you seen his tail? It’s all glossy and fluffy and his face is so…” Remus trailed off, and James dearly wanted to shake him. He refrained, which frankly deserved a medal of some kind.

“Do Welbers not have romantic relationships?” James asked. He felt certain Sirius would have looked this up at some point, but best to hear it straight from Remus rather than a library infofile, anyway.

“We do, yes, but I mean — Sirius is a Xolfon! A Xolfon has never even looked twice at a Welber, and we both know it.”

“I have some news about how much Sirius has looked at you, mate,” James said, wishing Sirius could just — well, he could hardly be _more_ obvious, but surely there was something that could be done.

“But he’s so—”

“You have beautiful glossy fur too!” James considered abandoning this conversation, saving himself, but he was a Good Friend, and a Good Friend could not possibly let this nonsense continue for any longer than it already had. “You could... brush each other’s beautiful glossy fur or whatever!”

As Remus gave him a look so poisonous he wished he had a bezoar on hand, he considered that perhaps that was not a ritual that Welbers shared with Xolfons. He would definitely need to give Sirius a heads up that he should not try that.

“Please Remus, I’m going to actually die if I have to watch him moon over you any longer. At least go find him? His detention ends in what, twenty minutes? You can go catch him on the way back and there won’t even be any witnesses.”

Remus looked absolutely terrified at this suggestion, eyes as large and round as Peter’s. “What if you’re wrong though?”

“Have I ever been wrong? Have you ever known me to actually be wrong about something?”

“Yes,” Remus said, far too emphatically for James’s liking. “Often. Especially about Evans.”

“... Well that doesn’t count, obviously. I promise you, I promise you I’m not wrong about this and I’ll do anything you want if I am. I’ll do all your homework and I’ll make sure we don’t get detention for a whole month. _Please_ ,” he said, begging with his hands clasped together. 

“I… guess…” Remus said, getting up, and James grinned. 

As he watched Remus leave the common room, he sent Sirius a text. They needed all the help they could get.

* * *

“Remus!” Sirius said, looking up from his phone to see Remus leaning awkwardly against the wall of the corridor outside the Mathematics classroom. He’d received a weirdly cryptic text from James that had just said ‘REMUS EN ROUTE, PLEASE KISS’. Well, it wasn’t _terribly_ cryptic, but with the way Remus was pretty much giving off waves of awkwardness, it didn’t make all that much sense.

“Remus,” Sirius repeated, trying to look slightly more casual. “Hello. Fancy seeing you here.” The casualness was ruined somewhat by the soft thump of his wagging tail against the floor. 

Remus blushed, which was intriguing because he’d never seemed to actually notice Sirius’s attempts to flirt before — or he’d just been impossibly cool about it. Given Sirius had shared a dormitory with him for five years and Remus was the least cool person he had ever met, he was pretty sure it was the former.

Sirius Black may never have developed a sense of shame, but he did have a sense of decency — he’d never done anything that would embarrass Remus, and he knew that Remus would hate being seen doing something as vulnerable as kissing the person that the whole school knew fancied him. Probably. Sirius didn’t actually know that at all, but he felt it was a fair assumption, so instead of taking the short way back to the common room he led Remus on a detour to the Astronavigation classroom, which was guaranteed to be deserted at this hour.

“So what brings your gorgeous self to accompany me from my detention on this fine evening?” Sirius asked as they turned from one of the main corridors onto the dimmer side corridor that led to Astronavigation.

“I—” Remus began, but stopped, instead blushing even more. 

Sirius figured this was not going to work out unless he did something drastic. Well, he’d considered the thing with the sauce at dinner pretty drastic, but apparently he needed to do something even _more_ drastic. 

“Could it have anything to do with this?” He showed Remus the screen of his phone with the text from James on it. 

“Um,” Remus said, looking a little constipated, and nodded. 

“And you, you know, want to kiss me? Because you don’t have to, whatever James has said.” Sirius wanted to kiss Remus, obviously — a lot — but he couldn’t rule out the possibility that James had spurred Remus into action (for a certain value of ‘action’) with something underhanded.

“Yeah,” Remus said quietly, looking at the floor. Sirius wasn’t really satisfied with that total lack of enthusiasm, but before he could say anything Remus continued speaking. “He said that you fancy me but that can’t be true, so I just. I dunno.”

“... Why can’t it be true? I’m pretty sure everyone in the school knows I fancy you. I wasn’t hiding it.”

“But you’re…” Remus gestured vaguely at Sirius, encompassing all of him.

“... Yeah,” Sirius said slowly. “Have you seen you, though? It’s unbelievable that you don’t have half the school writing love letters to you in swint sauce.”

Sirius wondered how red Remus could go before he either spontaneously combusted or fainted from all of his blood rushing to his face.

“I wish you’d realise—” Sirius said, before breaking off and sighing. This was going nowhere. “Could I kiss you?”

“Um,” Remus said, taking a step backwards and coming up against the wall of the corridor. “My teeth are poisonous?” His voice went up at the end, as if he were trying it on, throwing it out to see if Sirius believed him.

“You can just say no,” Sirius said. He felt a little hurt, if he were honest. 

“No, I mean, it’s true, I’ve got fangs — I’ve never kissed anyone before, and I don’t know if that’ll, you know, set them off or something? It’s not that I don’t want to,” Remus said, mumbling at the floor.

“... Will I die?”

“What do you mean?”

“Will I die if I end up on the wrong end of your poisonous teeth, as it were?”

“... No,” Remus said, after considering it for a moment. “I don’t think so.”

“Then I’ll risk it,” Sirius said. “I’m sure it’s worth it.”

“If you’re sure…” Remus said, and Sirius rolled his eyes before gently bringing Remus’s shoulders forward so Sirius could actually reach his face. He was far too tall.

The kiss was… well, Sirius had never kissed a human or a half-human before, so it was different from what he was used to, but he didn’t care at all because it was _Remus_ he was kissing. His fangs weren’t a problem, despite his protestations, and when they separated Sirius couldn’t keep the grin off his face. 

“Believe me yet?” he said, hands still around Remus’s neck.

“Yeah,” Remus said, a little breathlessly. Sirius was very proud of his handiwork.

“Come on, I guess we should get back to the common room and tell James the mission’s accomplished. It’s a bit of a shame, I think I was really refining my swint sauce artistic skills, we’ll never know what heights I could have risen to.”

“You don’t have to stop drawing things in swint sauce, I guess,” Remus said. He was still hunched over like he was trying to make himself smaller, but at least he was smiling, which Sirius counted as a success.

“That’s true. A whole new frontier of swint art is before me! Get ready to eat masterpieces for dinner.”

Sirius was delighted to see Remus actually _laugh_ at that, and pulled him in for another quick kiss before they rejoined their friends.


End file.
